Let me start by saying I think Linux Mint is one of the top 5 greatest distros of all time. It is an absolutely essential starting point for many people and their work is responsible for much of the user-friendliness you see in the world of Linux today. It is stable, has a nice aesthetic, “just works”, and doesn’t make you update constantly.
These things are great but they are the very things that make Linux Mint unsuited for online gaming. Is this a bad thing? No!! It’s just not a distro made for gaming purposes. It’s like showing up to a monster truck drag race in a Ferrari. I cannot count on my two hands how many times I have provided support to a user, to find their issue was outdated libraries due to using Linux Mint. It happens all the time. Go look at any game on ProtonDB that is currently working, and you’ll find 1-2 “not working” reports and they are always on either Debian on Mint.
I understand why we see it so often, because Linux Mint is awesome and users want to play their games on it. But if I suggested Hell Let Loose to a friend using Linux Mint right now, the first distro suggested for gaming in our FAQ, he wouldn’t be able to play because of his choice of distro. Making rolling distros look like a fortress in 2023 and suggesting Mint for gaming will only set new Linux users up for disappointment.
Nobody (or at least very few) puts Debian or Ubuntu LTS on their “Top 5 Gaming Distro” listicles, but literally every single one of them is putting Mint. When I installed Mint a couple months back, the kernel was on 5.2.x and I forget which version the mesa stack was on but it was very outdated as well.
Don’t get me wrong, Mint is awesome and I loved it while I used it. But if you just built a brand new machine and want to do some linux gaming, there are probably better choices.
It’s one of the things I’d love to see improved honestly - that the driver manager should be able to handle Mesa and firmware updates for newer hardware.
And the Mint team were a bit late this time around, but they often put out an ‘Edge’ ISO which contains a more up-to-date kernel.
I’m not at all going to shy away from issues that exist and I’d love to see some improvements to make Mint better in this area.
That comment would seem to be a misnomer since mint is built on top of a desbian base as well as Ubuntu. If you look at distros with a desbian foundation then it’s constantly at the top. The difference is the packages meaning all distros have the potential to perform well. They just need to be configured properly.
I would absolutely put Ubuntu LTS at the number one spot by a country mile. I just want to play games. I don’t want to spend hours tinkering or installing untested bleeding edge software in the hope of getting 2 more FPS. I did a lot of that 20 years ago because I am a hardcore nerd, but nowadays I want well-tested software that means everything works well out of the box.
I see problems coming up in this sub time and again that look like “I’m using libfrobnizzle-2.9.9-alpha7 and all of my colours are inverted”, where people respond like “lol you noob; that’s ancient history, it’s almost a week old - libfrobnizzle-2.9.9-alpha9-pre6.1 came out 17 seconds ago, just upgrade”. Meanwhile libfrobnizzle-2.8.42 works perfectly.